With the 2012 football season now just a month away, it’s time to roll out the preview of the Big Ten Conference teams, beginning this week with a look at the Legends Division. Last year was an overload of “new” for the Big Ten. It was the first year of the divisional alignment with the catchy division names...the inaugural conference championship game...and a whole new logo. All that to go along with four first-year coaches and a new member school in Nebraska.

Although six time defending champion Ohio State suffered through its worst season in two decades, on balance the conference had to be happy with the results of their new-look league. Wisconsin won the league’s first title game in a 42-39 thriller of a rematch with Michigan State, after the Spartans had prevailed during the regular season in one of the most dramatic finishes in recent memory.

It was something of a surprise that after Big Ten officials took great care to divide the four traditional “power” programs (Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State and Nebraska) equally between divisions, it was two teams from what was thought to be the league’s second tier, Wisconsin and Michigan State, that rose to the top to square off in Indianapolis in December.

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Sandusky is convicted. The Paterno statue is gone. The NCAA hammer has just fallen on Penn State. Kickoff at Beaver Stadium is at noon on September 1st against the Ohio University Bobcats. If that last bit strikes you as more than a little bit unseemly, join the club.

(Note: This column was written before Monday's NCAA press conference, though it has been edited slightly since)

I have pretty much kept my powder dry as far as writing on the Penn State situation here on the front page at TCF. To begin with, the subject is itself repellant, and the ”unspeakable” quality of the crimes and the cover-up rendered it that way for me for quite some time.  Besides that, I went for many weeks making a point not to join the “I’m more outraged than you are” competition going on among genuinely outraged Americans with keyboards. To paraphrase Ms. Steinem, I felt the world needed my opinion on the subject like a fish needs a bicycle. Little has changed in that regard I'm sure, notwithstanding what follows.

With the Sandusky trial behind them and years of civil suits still ahead, Penn State University is pressured by the looming season opener to come to grips now with just how Penn State football will proceed...or not proceed...in light of the Freeh Report’s damning findings.

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Thirty years ago the University of San Francisco basketball program was one of the most consistently successful in the sport. The Dons won back-to-back National Championships in the 1950’s with Bill Russell in the pivot and in the ‘60s and ‘70s, with stars like Ollie Johnson, Phil Smith and Bill Cartwright they were the second-strongest program in the West behind John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty. They even owned the top spot in the polls during the 1977 season.

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There is no amount of reality that can change the mind of someone in denial. Committed smokers will ignore every warning to their health until it's too late. So, too, apparently will the Board of Trustees of Penn State.

Seemingly committed to implementing most (but not, of course, all) of the recommendations of the Freeh report that detailed institutional criminal indifference to the helpless and numerous victims of Jerry Sandusky's sick obsessions, the Board of Trustees still can't understand the fuss about a little ol' statute of culprit and disgraced former head coach Joe Paterno that stands as a beacon of sorts, in not so Happy Valley.

The results of the independent investigation into the whys and wherefores and hows of Sandusky are such that for whatever good intention Penn State's so-called "Grand Experiment" of balancing athletics and academics once had that experiment is now over and it failed miserably.

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